On the afternoon of July 15, the event "Millennium Splendor ICH Gala: Nanjing's First National ICH Batch Goes Overseas" (千年华章·非遗盛典) opened at the Nanjing China-Finland International Exchange Center. Built around five segments — an industry matchmaking salon, craft presentations, cooperation signings, live demonstrations, and overseas resource matchmaking — the gala set out to open a two-way channel between ICH culture and cross-border trade, marking Nanjing Yunjin brocade (云锦), Jinling gold leaf, Jinling woodblock scripture printing, and the Qinhuai Lantern Fair as the city's first national-level ICH items to go overseas as a packaged group.
The timing was deliberate: 2026 marks the twentieth anniversary of China's first national ICH list. The event was guided by the Nanjing Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau and the Foreign Affairs Office of the Nanjing Municipal Government, hosted by the Nanjing ICH Protection Center and the Nanjing Chenggang Yunjin Research Center, and organized by Xingfeng Weiye (Beijing) Culture Communication Co. It also drew support from the Jiangsu Provincial Culture Industry Association, the Nanjing Culture Center, and the Qinhuai District Culture and Tourism Bureau, Foreign Affairs Office, and Commerce Bureau.
The centerpiece of the hall was a flower-tower drawloom (大花楼木织机) 5.6 meters long and 4 meters tall. Guo Jun (郭俊), a national-level representative inheritor of Nanjing Yunjin, led his team in a live demonstration: the draw-boy on the upper deck lifted warp threads according to the huaben pattern program, while the weaver below shot the weft through — the two working in seamless coordination. Staff compared the process to programming: the design is pixelated through the yijing design grid, and the workload is staggering. Two people working an entire day produce only five to six centimeters of fabric, which is how Yunjin earned its saying "one cun of brocade, one cun of gold" (寸锦寸金).
Nanjing Yunjin carries more than 1,600 years of history, including 700 years of imperial weaving, and holds status as both a national ICH item and a UNESCO-recognized intangible cultural heritage. At the gala, Guo Jun's Yunjin work "Dragons and Phoenixes" (龙凤呈祥) was integrated through photoelectric technology into the starry-sky dome of the Huawei Zunjie S800 luxury car. "It feels like stepping into a fairyland," Guo said, describing the cross-industry collaboration as an experiment in bringing Yunjin into modern life.
At the Jinling gold leaf zone, Sinisa Berjan, Bosnia and Herzegovina's ambassador to China, was visibly captivated. When he learned that the gold thread used in Yunjin begins as gold leaf hammered ten thousand times before being cut into filaments, he kept shaking his head: "This craft is so complex — it resonates spiritually with the traditional handicrafts of the Balkans. ICH going global should never be one-way export; it should be mutual inspiration."
Shi Xingfeng (释行风), chairman of the organizer Xingfeng Weiye, delivered the keynote "Millennium ICH Riding the Waves" (千年非遗·踏浪出海), reading the opportunity of cross-border cultural industries from the standpoint of hands-on operations. His team first encountered Yunjin in 2025 and was struck by its thousand-year craft value; in November of that year they launched the first round of market promotion and drew a wave of overseas consumers, which inspired the plan to build a standing export channel. "Many Chinese ICH items are luxury goods," Shi said. "Our job is to empower them, tell the Chinese story well, and take these treasures to the world."
The matchmaking salon then gathered Chinese and foreign guests around three core questions — the feasibility of ICH going overseas, the traits of overseas hit products, and quality overseas sales channels — working through real cases to dissect the industry's logic. The consensus reached: guard the roots of the craft at home, widen the market abroad.
Nanjing now holds 13 national-level ICH items; Yunjin flower-tower jacquard weaving, Jinling gold leaf forging, Jinling woodblock scripture printing, and the Qinhuai Lantern Fair were all part of the first national list announced in 2006. Anchored on that twentieth anniversary and on the collective strength of artisans such as Guo Jun, the gala aims to activate the millennium-old heritage through market mechanisms and forge a replicable "Nanjing model" for the internationalization of Chinese ICH.
